What is Ontology (ONT)? | Beginner’s Guide

What is Ontology?

Launched by Chinese company Onchain in 2017, Ontology is a public platform for projects of all shapes and sizes, and is a giant step toward removing barriers between the blockchain and business sector.

Ontology is revolutionary in the sense that it allows businesses without previous knowledge of distributed networks to use blockchain technology. Right now, there’s no way for businesses to integrate blockchain into their infrastructure without extensive knowledge of blockchain.

As well, current trust networks face a variety of issues. Poor privacy protection, untapped data value, data management monopolization, and ineffective identity authentication are all opportunities for blockchain. Ontology seems to resolve these issues with its solid trust ecosystem.

Through the tools Ontology created, corporations can implement trust mechanisms and tailor them to their business needs. Essentially, its blockchain protocol opens the door for the global adoption of blockchain technology in corporations. It eliminates the learning curve and offers mass-customization.

Ontology and NEO are perfect partners in a hungry race to digitize our world. Take a look at the video above for a pretty good overview of the project.

About the NEO/ Ontology Relationship

Last November, a crowd of blockchain enthusiasts and investors assembled in New York City. They came to hear Onchain, a company dedicated to developing blockchain systems, announce the launch of the groundbreaking platform, Ontology.

“Not only did we bring the best industry minds together, but the Ontology launch brought our project to the world stage” CEO of Onchain and NEO co-founder Da Hongfei said at the event. “Ontology and NEO will build a broad ecosystem using blockchain and other new technologies to serve the real economy. ”

The official website of Ontology lists Jun Li as the Founder of Ontology, and his LinkedIn lists him as the co-founder/ chief architect of Onchain.

However, the crypto community has often confused the roles of projects among each other. It should be clarified that NEO does not own Onchain nor Onchain own NEO. In a Youtube interview, Da Hongfei clears up the confusion with the companies roles.

“First, I need to clarify that NEO and Onchain are separate entities, so Onchain doesn’t own NEO, or NEO, Onchain. They are separately funded – NEO is funded by the community, and Onchain is funded by a very famous financial group in China, Fosun. They bought a lot of insurance companies and banks in Europe. So they are separate. Second, Onchain benefits from the NEO ecosystem. The product, called DNA, is very similar to NEO, but it is written in the Go language. OnChain is helping other blockchains and financial institutions to build their blockchains with DNA. It’s basically very similar to NEO, and in the future, with NEOx (the cross-chain protocol) everything can be linked together.” – Hongfei

Ontology Trust Network

Chain 1: Verification of people, wealth, things, and organizations.

Chain 2: Verify applications and link them together

Chain 3: Verify and link modules, protocols, SDK’s and API’s

Chain 4: All the different networks chains. This layer functions to link all the chains together.

As stated in the whitepaper, “in order to meet the needs of different industries, the flexible design structure is modularized, pluggable, and easily expandable.”

What this means is that Ontology is attempting to be universally adaptable for a wide-range of functions. They hope to be the go-to source for verifying the accuracy and authenticity of things like identity or ownership. Companies like Facebook will be able to easily plug into Ontology for trust.

ONT Token Structure

ONT was airdropped to NEO holders in March 2018. From this airdrop, 20 million ONT were distributed to the community by the NEO Council.

There will be a max supply of 1 billion ONT tokens which are indivisible, and you’ll get Ontology GAS (ONG) from holding ONT (similar to how NEO GAS functions). Ontology had previously awarded 1,000 ONT tokens to everyone who signed up to their newsletter (which is now closed).

More breakdown of the token distribution:

12% will go to the Ontology community

28% for institutional partners

10% to the NEO Council

25% to the development of the Ontology ecosystem

10% to Ontology technical community rewards

15% to Ontology core team.

Where Can You Buy and Store Ontology?

What is interesting about ONT is that it never had a public ICO sale. The only way to get NEO at this point is to get it airdropped via holding NEO on exchanges or private wallets (must be holding NEO by March 1). For each NEO coin you own, you’ll get 0.2 ONT in two phases (50% are immediately tradable, the other 50% are locked).

You can store ONT it on virtually all wallets as soon as you get it, including hardware wallets such as Ledger Nano S and Trezor. It’s probably best to download a wallet like Neon Wallet that will display ONT as some may not display ONT after the drop. However, you will still be able to retrieve the ONT from the airdrop by integrating your wallet with wallets that support the display of ONT.

Conclusion

According to its whitepaper, “sociologists put the number of people we trust at less than one hundred”, showing that for most people, it takes time and effort to trust someone and get to know them. Ontology is looking to replace the current lengthy ways we gain trust and bring us forward with blockchain automation of trust.

Ontology will also work together with NEO to bridge the gap between blockchain technology and the real world. While NEO and Ontology have similar goals, NEO focuses on digital assets and a global Smart Economy whereas Ontology focuses on trust, identity, and data exchange and authorization. Think of NEO and Ontology like peanut butter and jelly. They are mutually beneficial and put together, they make a tasty sandwich.

Finally, the team behind Ontology comprise of reputable cryptocurrency industry leaders with an already established history of success. And unlike many other blockchain projects, the Ontology team isn’t just targeting the financial industry. They’re focusing on insurance, government, medicine, IoT, and other industries during its growth, making it a wide-scale project with a lot of potential. With a relatively long-term presence in the blockchain industry and with a clear vision for the project, it wouldn’t come as a surprise to see Ontology work hand-in-hand with NEO to revolutionize the way we do business.

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CoinCentral's owners, writers, and/or guest post authors may or may not have a vested interest in any of the above projects and businesses. None of the content on CoinCentral is investment advice nor is it a replacement for advice from a certified financial planner.

Erin Gorsline

Erin is a Brooklyn based cryptocurrency enthusiast & freelance writer. Nomad at heart, you can often find her at the airport heading to her next adventure.